Hi I’m Shweta Pargaonkar

You can reach me at:  pargaonk@usc.edu






ABOUT

Hi I'm Shweta Pargaonkar and I am a computer science graduate student at USC.
I love learning about new technologies and trying to implement them in any small way possible.
My other interests include traveling. I also sometimes like writing about my experiences.












EDUCATION

Fergusson college, Pune is where I completed my high school from. Chemistry, Physics, Math, English and Computer Science were the subjects I took up here.
Studying Computer Science in high school was what inspired me to take up Computer Engineering in college.
I spent 2 years in this reknowned school and stood 5th in school in the board exams.
This is where I spent 4 memorable years of college studying Computer Engineering.
In my junior year at college I was introduced to the concept of machine learning and that was the focus of my final year project. I worked under the head of the Computer Engineering Dept on a research project that dealt with the random forest learning algorithm in the field of biometrics.
I had the opportunity to present a research paper at a National Conference that involved all the finger-print classification methods used to date. Some of the courses I took up are-

Courses Courses
Data Structures and Algorithms Discrete Structures
Principles of Programming Languages Computer Networks
Principles of Compiler Design Distributed Operating Systems
Computer Security Software Engineering












PROJECTS

Extracted features from fingerprints like the count of number of ridges, number of bifurcations, the inter ridge distance, number of cores and number of deltas.
The classification and prediction was done using the Random Forest algorithm on the ‘WEKA’ tool and we achieved a classification accuracy of about 95%.
Presented a survey paper at a National Conference about this project. It highlighted all the feature extraction methods used to extract biometric features.
Developed an e-commerce Web Application, using technologies like HTML, CSS, JQuery, Bootstrap, AJAX on the client side.
Made use of PHP at the back end with JSON for data transfer.
Fetched the results of the user query using an eBay API.
Converted the application to a mobile app for Android platform using Android Studio.
Made use of Facebook API to share and post result items to Facebook timeline.
Designed and worked on a simple algorithm called DPLL which determines whether a sentence in ‘logic’ is satisfiable or not.
Implemented the algorithm in Python. It converted a sentence in logic to its ‘Conjunctive Normal Form’ and then determined whether it is satisfiable or not.
Simulated a traffic shaper which transmits packets controlled by a token bucket filter using multi-threading in a single process.
Implemented the different threads using POSIX library, concepts like mutual exclusion, condition variables and handled external signals using concepts like thread cancellation and signal handling.












LIFE AT USC

In summer 2015 I had the lucky opportunity to work as one of the staff members for a summer camp organised by my 'Algorithms' professor Dr. Jeffery Miller
I was part of the 9 member team and we had to teach young kids to program in Scratch and Java.
It was the first time I worked with K12 kids and its was a thoroughly enjoyable expereince!
It felt amazing to be able to inspire young kids to start experimenting with programming from such a young age.
I am now a Student Mentor at a Robotics and Coding Academy teaching programming to 5th grade kids.





Copyright © 2015 - Shweta Pargaonkar